1 of 2 | The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear opening arguments as South Carolina Republicans look to uphold an electoral map that has been described as gerrymandering. File Photo by Ken Cedeno/UPI |
License PhotoOct. 11 (UPI) — The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Wednesday in a legal dispute to determine whether a South Carolina congressional district was gerrymandered to exclude thousands of Black voters.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit alongside the South Carolina branch of the NAACP and other Democratic stakeholders, issued a report Tuesday declaring the legal case critical to the future of voting rights in America, while calling on the Supreme Court to find the current map unconstitutional.
In January, a three-judge panel ordered that House District 1 maps be redrawn by the end of March after holding that race factored into Republican efforts to reconfigure one of the state’s seven congressional districts held by Democrats.
However, a revised map was never produced as the case remained on appeal at the Supreme Court, which has allowed the GOP to strengthen its grip in a previous Democratic stronghold.
The forthcoming ruling is expected to finally settle the matter after a long pause to await the high court’s return to business in October to hear a new slate of cases, and could put a new voting map in place just ahead of the 2024 election.
The suit, which claims violations of the 14th Amendment right to equal treatment under the law, asserts that South Carolina Republicans aimed to disenfranchise Black voters by redrawing the district.
When the congressional map was redrawn after the 2020 Census, about 30,000 Black people were removed from District 1 — which includes the city and county of Charleston — and reallocated to District 6, held by Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, in what the judges described as a case of “stark racial gerrymandering.”
In the ruling, the court noted that state legislators had legal standing to consider a broad array of factors in the design of a legislative district to raise GOP numbers in areas that historically lean Democrat. However, they could not “use race as a predominant factor and may not use partisanship as a proxy for race,” the judges wrote.
Republicans, led by South Carolina Senate President Thomas Alexander, appealed the ruling to the high court in an effort to keep the congressional seat in the hands of incumbent, Republican Nancy Mace, who won handily with the redrawn map by 14% in 2022.
Under the redrawn map, Mace won the district back for Republicans by 1% in 2020 after Democrat Joe Cunningham won the district overwhelmingly in 2018.
Previously, South Carolina Senate Attorney John Gore argued that the redrawn map complied with traditional redistricting principles by preserving the district cores and repairing county splits.
If the map is redrawn again as a result of the high court ruling, it would likely make the district more competitive but wouldn’t necessarily assure an outright victory for either Democrats or Republicans, political experts said.
